Bright laser illumination poses a problem as many organisms have bodies that will strongly reflect or refract the light required to illuminate tracer particles. In addition, most µPIV systems still rely on expensive diode-pumped solid state or Nd:YAG lasers and often require a controller to synchronize pulses with a high-resolution camera's frame capture. However, these systems are generally applied in narrow microfluidics devices ( Santiago et al., 1998 Hsieh et al., 2004 Shinohara et al., 2004 Lima et al., 2008) and thus impractical for studying free-swimming organisms due to the influence of “wall effects” ( Webb, 1993). In recent years, micro-scale PIV (µPIV) systems have become available. Thus, resolving detailed animal–fluid interactions at these small scales will allow new areas of exploration as the majority of life in the ocean is ≤1 mm and contributes to many important oceanic processes and ecosystem functions. The latter is a result of the standard PIV method becoming impractical at fields of view less than a few millimeters. This is due to the fact that a significant knowledge gap exists in our understanding of small-scale animal–fluid interactions because direct observations are either non-existent or of poor quality. However, our understanding of basic processes, such as feeding and swimming of small organisms operating under primarily viscous conditions (low Re), remains limited. This technique has led to a significant increase in our understanding of how animals operating under inertial fluid regimes (high Reynolds number), utilize fluids for locomotion ( Tytell and Lauder, 2004 Epps and Techet, 2007 Jiang and Kiørboe, 2011), feeding ( Higham et al., 2006 Holzman and Wainwright, 2009) and mating ( Yen et al., 2011). Particle image velocimetry (PIV) has become an important and widely used tool in biological research involving fluid motion.
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